Menu

Last month was the opening for my first ever public artwork, showcased on the Southern Cross University’s videowall in Lismore. Named ‘Facing our Future’, the video overlays quotes from climate scientists and climate change experts with satellite images of the Earth. The quotes are extracts of interviews conducted by me as part of a research project called ‘Living safely in a world of climate change’, which seeks to understand what measures climate change experts personally implement to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change on their own lives and on the lives of their (grand-)children. The satellite images originate from Geoscience Australia and the National Computational Infrastructure and…

Climate change is real, and is already having devastating impacts on our planet, our wildlife and on humanity. The future looks dire, and it’s an understatement to say that climate change, alongside, and including biodiversity loss, is the challenge of the century. This said, we are not just doomed yet. We do have a short window of opportunity to act, in order to slow down the effects of climate change and, perhaps, in the future, reverse some of them. The task seems overwhelming and cynics, deniers, and doomsayers may be discouraging, but this is what we can do. It all comes down to ‘mitigating’, ‘adapting’, and, yes… ‘surviving’ – but…

As you probably already know, the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate calls for a limitation of a 2°C increase above pre-industrial levels of the average global temperature – and preferably 1.5°C – recognizing that “this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.” According to the latest report from the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we will be reaching the 1.5°C threshold increase around 2030 if we continue to live ‘business-as-usual’. To avoid this, we have around 11 years to – drastically – change the course of climate change. While the IPCC recalls that “[c]limate-related risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic…

Hammered by daunting climate change related headlines Recent news headlines in Australia and beyond are daunting. While northern Queensland has been battling with a “once-in-a-century flooding”, Tasmania is facing a “historic event”, an “unprecedented” “fire crisis”. Meanwhile the recent Australian droughts may have been the worst in 800 years. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) announced that January 2019 was Australia’s hottest month since records began and that climate change “contributed to soaring temperatures”, which followed an already “record-breaking December”. Heatwaves don’t solely make us feel more sick, agitated or lethargic. They kill en masse. “Over two days in November, record-breaking heat in Australia’s north wiped out almost one-third of…

Well, this is apparently what some Samoan clerics have stated: “Clerics in the South Pacific have fingered the key cause of climate change – homosexuals. The revelation came at a conference at the University of the South Pacific considering the implications of Climate Change and Creativity.” The clerics haven’t explained the rationale of their arguments though – although the Register suspects “their latching onto climate change as a consequence of gayness is informed by a more biblical sense of cause and effect.” Or maybe, as a blogger funnily posted elsewhere “Global warming is a gay issue. […] The heat generated in discos, bath houses, the manufacture of interior furnishings, leather tanning…